Before my vision is turned upside down and narrowed to the space between my calves, I note that none of the prayer flags are tattered as they lay against the commercial white wall. I wonder what kind of prayers they’ve heard from the people practicing yoga in this room, and what kind of promises they whisper back when practitioners are supposed to be focusing on their breath. I wonder, for example, if they have heard my prayer that I want to go back to running, that I want yoga to heal the stress fracture in my spine so that would be possible. It would be pointless to say I loved to run, and I could go on and on about all the ways I’ve missed it. Suffice it to say I’ve missed it enough to end up in a space I don’t appreciate fully with a handful of strangers, where I stare and speak to prayer flags, and where I feel a kind of quiet loss I refuse to admit is sadness.
Bodies all around me bend forward on yoga mats like felled trees in a silent forest. If this were an image in, say, a glossy yoga magazine the median age of the people in the room would be 31 and we would all be in reasonably good physical condition, ready to bend and twist in all sorts of ways. Since this is reality, let’s be honest: we’re pushing 50, mildly to extremely out of shape, and, if I was a betting person, I’d say we are all here because some part of us aches or has been broken once or more than once, and yoga has been a prescribed salve. When we bend down for padahastasana, for example, the studio sounds like a dog has just leapt on bubble wrap: but it’s our hips, knees and ankle joints announcing their presence: pop-pop-pop punctuated by a loud sigh or groan from the owner of those popping joints.
Breathe. This is what they tell you to do before anything else in a yoga class. I should know—I feel like I’ve been to about a million of them since an MRI revealed I have a chronic stress fracture in my spine that has enabled the misalignment of my vertebrae, which pinches a nerve. There is no real cure for what I have aside from what the orthopedic surgeon called “pain management”— which is the reason why yoga replaced running. “You are never going to heal from this,” he told me, as if I had any trouble understanding.
I practice in a studio located in an outdoor mall, squeezed between a Starbucks and a high-end jeweler. In my first week of dedicated practice meant to facilitate real healing, I sit in my car too long and entertain thoughts like If I was a horse this happened to, people would have shot me already.
Once I get up enough courage and humility to walk inside, I take off my shoes and set them on the rack dedicated for them by the front door, say hello to the person behind the reception desk and find the studio space, where I set my yoga mat on the ground somewhere near the front so that I can see myself and others in the mirror.
Once class begins, I do my best not to focus on what my eyes perceive (prayer flags on one side, the reflection of my forty-year-old body pantomiming the postures announced by the yoga instructor on the other), or what my body feels (pain, primarily, pins and needles followed by the cold frigid death of my pinched nerve), or the long string of stories I tell myself about what brought me here, and why “healing” is the desired outcome from all this yoga.
As I breathe in the middle of the quiet room with other quiet bodies around mine, I travel back in time, back before the trail races, before the ultra-endurance cycling, before Ironman triathlons and shorter triathlons, before swim meets, before the marathons, before karate and aikido practice when I tried to break other people, before modern dance, before pole-vault, before cross country and track, before musical theater, before cheerleading, before gymnastics, before ballet, before learning to walk, before the before time before that, the litany of scrapes and bruises that form the topography of my skin and the core essence of who I believe I am—the person who accessed freedom by running.
Bend and rise. The instructor announces “half moon pose” and I bend first to the left and then to the right. This is followed by a back bend before a full swoop forward— we are moving the spine along all possible axes of the body. Encased within the bone coin purse of each vertebrae are a bundle of nerves that I envision as colorful wires, like the kind that are exposed in commercial buildings when the ceiling tiles come loose. Arcing my body to the right, I lengthen my left flank to the sky and the coin purse opens, and the colorful wires shimmer in the light. One of them—the injured one, which I have imagined is hot pink—releases an anthrax-like glitter that coats the laminate floor and my yoga mat like pixie dust.
I imagine the lethal glitter has gummed up the connections between the wires and I want them to reattach, to heal. I inhale deeply as I imagine my nerves intertwining around one another in a wild psychedelic rainbow— that is terrible, beautiful, and tragic.
It’s not that I am not focused. In fact, the opposite is true. I follow the instructor’s cues by refining the posture while listening in on my body’s internal language of sensation. A pain here, numbness there, a muscle pulled taught, another slack. It is work for me not to string these sensations into a story about what is happening in my life now, and what that will mean for me in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.
In the case of most of the injuries I’ve experienced, there is always an end when you’re healed and you can return to life as you knew it before. With chronic pain, I am learning, there is no end. There are good days and bad days spread out across the rest of your life—but the peaks and valleys are arbitrary, and therefore, the source of healing and hope has to change.
Steeple grip. Following the instructor’s cue my arms rise overhead in an arc, connecting above my head, with my biceps pressing into my ears. The hands clasp one another by crossing the thumbs and criss-crossing all but the pointer fingers that rise like a church steeple into the air. I can’t help but hear the rhyme “Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people” with an adult’s fingers wiggling inside their enclosed hands, and for most of my childhood, the gesture was lost on me.
For many people, yoga is a kind of religion — and I don’t mean middle-to-upper class white people in the United States. Yoga is an ancient devotional practice in which the physical postures are only one element, yet Americans have latched onto the physical part as something that can be as spiritual as it is healthy. Yoga, for many adults, is an hour-long fitness option bookended by the ambiguous “namaste”, a word curiously close to Hawaii’s “aloha” that can mean either hello or goodbye.
This version of yoga— the yoga comprised of postures, sometimes flowing together, sometimes held as static expressions, is what fueled a craze in the mid-1990s onwards. Yoga as a form of exercise that can tone your abs while it heals you (a true miracle.) Yoga becomes the requisite insert in every women’s fitness magazine, with headlines like “Feel Om-mazing” and “In Down Dog, the Sky’s the Limit” that tout the many benefits of a regular yoga practice, such as improved sleep and digestion, detoxification, flushed lymph nodes, clearer skin, a better backside, and increased longevity—claims that have yet to be fully supported by research.
As I lay on my back looking up at the tiled ceiling, I pull one bent leg just outside of my chest, trying to touch my knee to my armpit. The instructor tells me that I am compressing my transcending colon, detoxifying my body in a posture that is called “wind removing pose.” I half-wonder if it is a good idea to compress any part of my colon or remove my interior wind while in a public place, but then, everyone in the class is doing it so I might as well participate. This is what I paid for.
Flexibility. The yoga room is heated and humidified to encourage the muscles to open and to enable practitioners to deepen their stretching. Hot yoga is based on what was once called Bikram Yoga, named after its founder, Birkram Choudhury, an Indian-American guru who was subject to a series of lawsuits for his alleged sexual assault and discrimination of his clients. In 2017, a court found Choudhury guilty, but he fled the United States before paying any legal fines.
Bikram Yoga, when it was around, was touted as a cure-all. The founder’s story—or the version he told the public, the version I remember when I practiced Bikram Yoga— was this: an Olympic contender in weightlifting with broken knees, Bikram and the 26 postures in his series enabled him to heal. Scores of followers would have similar claims: bodies laid low by scoliosis, herniated disks, broken bones that healed improperly, muscular imbalances, could be cured by this specific a series of postures he claimed to have assembled like a musical composition. By no means did Bikram Yoga cure everybody, and in addition to the legal fraud he perpetrated, the man himself did quite a bit of psychological damage to those who followed his practice through his immoral actions.
What does it mean that the practice meant to heal you was created by a terrible person? Can the means justify the ends, or do questions like these even matter? I once did four Bikram classes in a single day, spurred by a challenge hosted by the studio I attended, looking for the flash of white light—of healing and transcendence. But after six hours in a room heated to 106 degrees with 60% humidity, I emerged with a single—albeit delirious—question: If yoga has healed so many people, why can’t it heal me?
Years later, I am still looking for the answer to that question. Perhaps it has to do with my understanding of healing, which used to be a synonym for “fixed” as in repaired, as in “as good as new,” as if the injury never happened. But as the weeks turn to months and the months turn into a year, and running as a possibility fades and then disappears altogether, healing means something else. It is something more like a sunrise, when the light can refract in infinite ways, and you never know exactly which way it’s going to go: bright flamingo pink or a subtle, slow rise of daylight. What is certain—what is always certain— is that it’s a new day, and your’e going to have to live it.
Healing, maybe. The end of the standing series can’t come fast enough when you have a debilitating injury to your nerves caused by a stress fracture in your spine. In the first few weeks of my practice, I wanted to gouge my eyes out by the time the instructor announced “standing bow pulling pose”— which comes relatively early in the class. However, with each passing day, week, and month as the nerve healed, I noticed that I could tolerate more time on my feet.
When I think about it, yoga offered containers in which to put my pain. For example, for a long time there was a “Standing Bow-Pulling Pose” container, and for a while, the pain took up about three quarters of it. But the more I practiced, the less space the pain occupied, only half of the posture, then a quarter, then 10% until, as if by magic, pain was no longer the focus of my practice.
These days, I come to yoga to practice yoga, which means I breathe, I stretch, and I quiet the circus inside my mind. I find a solitude different than the kind I found pounding out the long miles, certainly, but one that offers me a sense of peace that makes living another day less like a chore and more like a gift I’ve been given. The detoxification, balance, restoration, the letting go, the Buddhist koans that ask questions like: how much does that rock in the meadow weigh? And that tell us, after a pause, nothing if you do not pick it up.
Healing is just a human concept, after all, a label for a mysterious and some might say mystical process. A long unfolding that leads us down an unlikely path where we discover what we thought we always wanted was beside the point—and that the source of joy was never anything other than freedom.
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